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Tatham Macinnes acted for a well known UK based ship sale & purchase broker following the discovery that their website had been cloned.  They had received a call from a disgruntled trader in the Middle East who had sold a consignment of frozen fish via the fraudulent brokers, and had not been paid.  Our clients’ managing director’s details appeared on the cloned website together with a host of other almost identical material including their address and company registration number.  The fraudsters had not even bothered to change the large, let alone small print.  The team mobilised, tracked down and confronted the web-designer and instructed local lawyers in the UAE.

A complaint was lodged with Action Fraud in the UK, a demand filed with the domain registrar to take the website offline  and Google were requested to remove the website from their search results either under phishing or DMCA (copyright) grounds. Within 12 hours of instruction the site was taken down. We may be best known for our expertise in shipping but with both a former web designer and a former member of the UK police on our staff, and being well versed in social media, dealing with fraud in and around the shipping world, not to mention hijacking and terrorism situations, represents a growing area of our practice.